This Feb 13, 2019 photo shows the icon of Tiktok, upper right corner, an application developed by Chinese tech company ByteDance, on a smartphone screen. (SHI ZHONGYU / XINHUA)

BEIJING – The number of mobile apps shrank in the Chinese market in 2019 while those for music and video reported robust downloads.

About 3.67 million mobile apps were available in China by the end of December, down by 18.8 percent from a year earlier, data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showed.

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Mobile games continued to lead the apps in number, accounting for about one-quarter of the total, followed by daily tools, e-commerce and life services apps.

Music and video apps reported the most downloads, followed by social networking and communication tools, MIIT data showed.

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Despite the shrinking mobile apps, China remained the world's largest market for mobile apps user spending, according to a report from global app market data provider App Annie.

Video apps topped others in terms of user spending in the country, the report said.